Interview with the author of the forthcoming The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World , who is now doing the magazine circuit. "What's happening is that a number of different factors have come together to create a truly global academic marketplace on a scale that's never been seen before," he argues. "As travel and communication gets even easier and cheaper, one could imagine wholesale mergers to create global institutions – the university equivalent of multinational corporations." A sobering thought.